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From: Baldoni on 2 Feb 2010 08:41
Baldoni was thinking very hard :
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article2599589.ece
>
> The nation state is a crumbling institution, according to Britain's most
> illustrious historian, and he believes that football shows why.
>
> Professor Eric Hobsbawm told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature
> Festival yesterday that football was a “textbook illustration of the internal
> contradictions of globalisation in the period of the nation state”.
>
> A section of his latest book Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism is
> devoted to the argument but “this has not been picked up by the critics
> except, you will not be surprised to hear, the Brazilian ones”.
>
> Professor Hobsbawm remains, at 90, both revered and reviled for the lifelong
> commitment to Marxism that underpinned his classic histories of the past two
> centuries: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and
> The Age of Extremes.
>
> However, he is also interested in football, and is intrigued by the way that
> the game has mutated into a global business dominated by the
>
> “imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises” such as Manchester United and
> Real Madrid.
>
> “Neither the local nor the national identification is what defines the
> economy of football today,” he said.
>
> “What defines it is that since globalisation it's been possible for a
> consortium of wealthy clubs in a particular set of Western European countries
> to build themselves up as global brands which have relatively little contact
> with their original local roots and hire people from all over the world.
>
> “They make money by selling goods, such as T-shirts, by television and to a
> diminishing extent by people watching [live] football.”
>
> Logically these clubs would prefer to limit the game to a super-league of
> teams playing together irrespective of national leagues and local loyalties,
> were it not for one thing: football's marketability is rooted in nationalism.
>
> “You see it whenever there's a World Cup. What keeps the whole system going
> is the fact that football is something noneconomic for a large number of
> people who use it to identify themselves and their country.”
>
> As he once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real in the
> form of 11 named people.”
>
> For many Cameroonians, for example, the first time that they had a sense of
> themselves as members of an independent nation state was when their team
> played at the World Cup, Professor Hobsbawm said.
>
> “This is a type of internal contradiction. There was a nice interview with
> Arsene Wenger [the manager of Arsenal] the other day which sketches it out
> very well. He said: 'I'm not interested in national teams but I know we have
> got to have them because that's what keeps the money coming in'.”
>
> The consequences of this tension between globalised commerce and national and
> local loyalties are legion, according to Professor Hobsbawm. They include a
> weakening of the traditionally strong but economically poor national teams
> such as Brazil, which now export most of their players to Europe, and the
> rise of racism in counties such as Holland and Spain, where fans find
> themselves torn between pride in their clubs and prejudice against players
> from nations long thought of as inferior who are becoming increasingly
> prominent in their stadiums. Like their international football teams,
> Professor Hobsbawm suggests, nation states are finding that their strength is
> being eroded by the emergence of transnational interests. He questions
> whether any modern democracies would be able to field vast conscript armies
> as they did routinely in the 20th century.
>
> “The process which turned peasants into Frenchmen and immigrants into
> American citizens is reversing.” However, he concluded: “The nation state is
> crumbling but we can't do without it. The world is, in some sense, not fully
> globalisable. Just as clubs and world football must coexist, so globalisation
> must coexist with the national interests which still have enough leverage to
> establish themselves.”

--
Count Baldoni

In hoc signo vinces


From: Ted on 8 Feb 2010 11:55
On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:41:32 GMT, Baldoni <BaldoniXXV(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:

>Baldoni was thinking very hard :
>> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article2599589.ece
>>
>> The nation state is a crumbling institution, according to Britain's most
>> illustrious historian, and he believes that football shows why.
>>
>> Professor Eric Hobsbawm told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature
>> Festival yesterday that football was a “textbook illustration of the internal
>> contradictions of globalisation in the period of the nation state”.
>>
>> A section of his latest book Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism is
>> devoted to the argument but “this has not been picked up by the critics
>> except, you will not be surprised to hear, the Brazilian ones”.
>>
>> Professor Hobsbawm remains, at 90, both revered and reviled for the lifelong
>> commitment to Marxism that underpinned his classic histories of the past two
>> centuries: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and
>> The Age of Extremes.
>>
>> However, he is also interested in football, and is intrigued by the way that
>> the game has mutated into a global business dominated by the
>>
>> “imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises” such as Manchester United and
>> Real Madrid.
>>
>> “Neither the local nor the national identification is what defines the
>> economy of football today,” he said.
>>
>> “What defines it is that since globalisation it's been possible for a
>> consortium of wealthy clubs in a particular set of Western European countries
>> to build themselves up as global brands which have relatively little contact
>> with their original local roots and hire people from all over the world.
>>
>> “They make money by selling goods, such as T-shirts, by television and to a
>> diminishing extent by people watching [live] football.”
>>
>> Logically these clubs would prefer to limit the game to a super-league of
>> teams playing together irrespective of national leagues and local loyalties,
>> were it not for one thing: football's marketability is rooted in nationalism.
>>
>> “You see it whenever there's a World Cup. What keeps the whole system going
>> is the fact that football is something noneconomic for a large number of
>> people who use it to identify themselves and their country.”
>>
>> As he once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real in the
>> form of 11 named people.”
>>
>> For many Cameroonians, for example, the first time that they had a sense of
>> themselves as members of an independent nation state was when their team
>> played at the World Cup, Professor Hobsbawm said.
>>
>> “This is a type of internal contradiction. There was a nice interview with
>> Arsene Wenger [the manager of Arsenal] the other day which sketches it out
>> very well. He said: 'I'm not interested in national teams but I know we have
>> got to have them because that's what keeps the money coming in'.”
>>
>> The consequences of this tension between globalised commerce and national and
>> local loyalties are legion, according to Professor Hobsbawm. They include a
>> weakening of the traditionally strong but economically poor national teams
>> such as Brazil, which now export most of their players to Europe, and the
>> rise of racism in counties such as Holland and Spain, where fans find
>> themselves torn between pride in their clubs and prejudice against players
>> from nations long thought of as inferior who are becoming increasingly
>> prominent in their stadiums. Like their international football teams,
>> Professor Hobsbawm suggests, nation states are finding that their strength is
>> being eroded by the emergence of transnational interests. He questions
>> whether any modern democracies would be able to field vast conscript armies
>> as they did routinely in the 20th century.
>>
>> “The process which turned peasants into Frenchmen and immigrants into
>> American citizens is reversing.” However, he concluded: “The nation state is
>> crumbling but we can't do without it. The world is, in some sense, not fully
>> globalisable. Just as clubs and world football must coexist, so globalisation
>> must coexist with the national interests which still have enough leverage to
>> establish themselves.”


I never trust anybody over 90

Ted
 | 
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